He threw her one of his wild, furtive looks, and again in his eyes she caught a glimpse of something that deeply moved her. She laid a comforting hand on his shoulder.
"Is that it, lad? Are you wanting her? Ah, don't fret then—don't fret!
She'll surely come back—some day."
The boy's face quivered. He looked down at his clenched hands, and at length jerkily, laboriously, he spoke, giving difficult and bitter utterance to the trouble that gnawed at his heart.
"It's—Dicky that wants her. But she won't come—she won't come—while I'm here." A sudden hard shiver went through him, he drew his breath through his set teeth, with a desperate sound. "No woman would," he said with hard despair.
And then abruptly, as if with speech his misery had become unendurable, he blundered to his feet with outflung arms, making the only outcry against fate that his poor stunted brain had ever accomplished. "It isn't fair!" he wailed. "It isn't right! I'm going to God—to tell Him so!"
He turned with the words, the impulse of the stricken creature urging him, and ignoring the remonstrance which Mrs. Rickett had barely begun he made headlong for the door, dragged it open, and was gone.
He went past his little playmate in the yard, shambling blindly for the open, deaf to the baby's cry of welcome, insensible to everything but the bitter burden of his pain. He slammed the gate behind him and set off at a lumbering run down the glaring road.
The evening sun smote full in his face as he went; but it might have been midnight, for he neither saw nor felt. Instinct alone guided him—the instinct of the wild creature, hunted by disaster, wounded to the heart, that must be alone with its agony and its fruitless strife against fate.
He went up the cliff-path, but he did not follow it far. Something drew him down the narrow cleft that led to the spot where first he had seen her lying on the shingle dreaming with her head upon her arm. He turned off the path to the place where he had crouched among the gorse-bushes and flung stones to scare her away, and stood there panting and gazing.
The memory of her, the gracious charm, the quick sympathy, went through him, pierced him. He caught his breath as though he listened for the beloved sound of her voice. She had not been really angry with him for the wantonness of those stones. She had been very ready with her forgiveness, her kindly offer of friendship. She had never been other than kind to him ever since. She had awakened in him the deepest, most humble gratitude and devotion. She had even once or twice shielded him from Dicky's never unjust wrath. And he had come to love her second only to Dicky who must for ever hold the foremost place in his heart.